Film still of Climate Change by Barbara Santos. With contributions from Reynel Ortega and Stephen Hugh-Jones 11 Mar 2025
18:00 - 19:00
The Acknowledgment of Loss, Listening to the Amazon Forest
On 11 March, Framer Framed hosts The Acknowledgement of Loss, Listening to the Amazon Forest, a talk by artist and researcher Bárbara Santos about efforts to safeguard ancestral knowledge in the Amazon. The evening zooms in on intercultural translation and the gaps this creates in the “outside world’s” understanding of how to approach the forest’s protection and management.
The talk is accompanied by the short films Rodori Rohokwase – Climate Change and Delegate the Meaning. In these videos, Barasana sabedor (‘wise man’) Reynel Ortega sends a message to the people who were left on the other side of the barrier (the gawa), people in the West. Ortega meets with anthropologist Stephen Hugh-Jones and shares his perspective on ‘climate change’, a foreign concept for most sabedores. The original message is in the Barasano language, one of over 300 Indigenous languages in the Amazon Basin, and was translated into English by Hugh-Jones. However, it quickly became clear that a lot of comprehension is lost in this translation, since there are also deep misunderstandings about the agency of ancestral management; about what actually regenerates life in the Amazon forest.
The videos are exercises in translation that not only function as an interpretation – the transfer of a discourse from one language to another – but translation as the loss of meaning when a language originating in the Amazon is translated into a non-Amazonian language. What is found is the impossibility of translation.
Activating the videos, Santos opens the conversation about the loss of the forest and the intrusion to cultures that have held a reciprocal and balanced relationship with it for millennia. The evening is an effort to generate a space of real respect for these forms of knowledge that have so much to tell us, but that unfortunately are highly threatened.
This programme is organised within the framework of Planetary Poetics, an initiative of Dorine van Meel and Framer Framed.
Planetary Poetics is a master’s programme at the Sandberg Institute that enables participants to develop artistic research exploring key concepts of the ecological crisis, including questions of climate justice, land restitution and reparations, reproductive justice, and constellations of co-resistance. Planetary Poetics is and initiative of Dorine van Meel and Framer Framed.
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This event may be photographed and filmed. Kindly let us know in advance if you prefer not to have your picture taken.
Framer Framed is supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science; Amsterdam Fund for the Arts; Municipality of Amsterdam; and VriendenLoterij Fonds.
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